196 



IHE INDiA RUBBER WORLD 



[March i, 1905. 



THE LATH UR. C. O. WEBER. 



TH E career of the late Dr. Cari Otto Weber was the subject 

 of a paper read before the American Chemical Society, 

 at a recent meeting in Boston, by Mr. Arthur D. Little, a mem- 

 ber. From this paper some extracts are given below, bearing 

 upon the interesting personality of the distinguished chemist ; 

 the purely biographical details are omitted, to avoid duplica- 

 tion of facts given in our slcetch of Dr. Weber printed last 

 month. Mr. Little said : 



" - - - I first met Weber about five years ago in Manchester. 

 He was then chemist and manager of the Greengate Rubber 

 Works, one of the largest in England. The manufacture of 

 rubber goods abroad is not specialized to anything like the ex- 

 tent which obtains here, and it would probably be impossible 

 to find in the United States, though I speak without informa- 

 tion, any works devoted to the manufacture of so great a vari- 

 ety of rubber products as this great English plant. Weber 

 thus became practically familiar with the making of rubber 

 shoes, mechanical goods, mackintosh cloths, hose, cables, and 

 many other things to an extent which could hardly fall to a 

 rubber chemist here. His work was of course mainly con- 

 cerned with the daily intricacies of this complex manufacture, 

 and it left him little time for research. To what good use that 

 little time was put his patents, his book, ' The Chemistry of 

 India-rubber,' and his many published papers show. I remem- 

 ber that at the time of our first meeting he was especially 

 pleased with the results he had obtained in printing with alum- 

 inum inks colored silk patterns on the rubber side of unfaced 

 mackintosh cloths. The fabrics could hardly be distinguished 

 from the silk lined cloths a foot away. 



" I remember also that he was then following the degrada- 

 tion changes which occur in the working of rubber by a series 

 of molecular weight determinations by the boiling point method 

 on the rubber in its different stages of manipulation. This 

 struck me at the time as a beautiful adaptation of the methods 

 of pure science to technical work. The whole subject of the 

 colloids had an absorbing interest for him. He regarded them 

 as being, as undoubtedly they are, the connecting link between 

 living and dead matter, and the great volume in which Gra- 

 ham's researches were published were always on his desk. I 

 still hold vividly in mind one night at Blackpool when Cross, 

 the cellulose chemist, Weber, and myself sat up till 3 o'clock 

 stretching chemical theory until it broke, and all the talk was 

 of the colloids. On Weber's part it was a memorable display 

 of the scientific imagination directed and controlled by the 

 cold logic of fact. I saw another side of the man during a 

 week's end at Windermere in the beautiful English lake 

 region. He was keenly responsive to every changing phase of 

 nature and alive to all the associations which English literature 

 has thrown around that region. 



" The work which first brought us together had to do not 

 with rubber but with cellulose, and though this was my own 

 specialty and a somewhat alien subject to him, Weber quickly 

 made me feel that I must be very sure of my ground before each 

 step. Cellulose was a colloid, and he claimed all colloids for 

 his province. He introduced me to Biitschli's work and point- 

 ed out again and again how the peculiarities of plant structure 

 might be traced to the colloidal character of cellulose. He de- 

 vised the first process for the preparation of cellulose acetate 

 in commercial quantities and was the first to prepare any of 

 the higher fatty acid esters of cellulose. 



" I shall have sadly failed if I have not yet made clear to you 

 that Dr. Weber was a remarkable man. I would like to give 

 you his personal history in some detail but that unfortunately 



I cannot do. - - - His ancestry was largely German, largely 

 Scotch, and for generations one of the sons had entered the 

 ministry as a matter of course and family tradition. I had al- 

 ways found it difficult to orient him with the Germans. He 

 used to say himself that in his man's estate he could not hope 

 to remain out of jail three months in Germany, and I remem- 

 ber very well the delight with which I learned that the Scotch 

 were so largely responsible for his being. It explained so many 

 things. He was more Scotch than German in appearance. He 

 had the Scotch love of controversy and the German imagina- 

 tion, German science, German music. As a Scotchman he 

 studied theology, as a German he studied philosophy and 

 poetry and music ; then he studied chemistry. How many of 

 us here to-night can say that our own chemistry might not 

 have builded better on such a foundation. 



" - - - In Colombia he studied the gathering and curing of 

 rubber upon the spot. He was able to prove there that no rub- 

 ber exists in the fresh latex, that it is an oxidation product, 

 and that the coagulation of the latex is due to albumenoids and 

 not to rubber. He prepared there and brought back with him 

 samples of rubber as clear as celluloid. 



" - - - Shortly after his return to England from Colombia 

 the Hood Rubber Co., in what has always seemed to me a 

 spirit of unusual liberality and appreciation, made definite 

 overtures to secure his services for a term of years, upon terms 

 which not only promised a competence by the end of the period, 

 but best of all offered every facility and incentive for the re- 

 search work he had had so long in mind. He took this tide in 

 his affairs at flood and came to Boston. The establishment of 

 the India-Rubber Research Laboratory at No. 19 Columbia 

 street immediately followed, with Dr. Weber at its head. It 

 was one of the very best working laboratories I have ever seen 

 and it is where he left it. The laboratoiy is there but the di- 

 recting mind is missing. 



" - - - Chemistry suffers in the popular estimation because 

 it is assumed to touch life at fewer points than the professions 

 of theology, the law, or medicine. As chemists we are inclined 

 to accept that estimation. But the dignity of his profession 

 was always in Weber's mind and because of his influence dur- 

 ing his few months in Boston we may each take new pride that 

 we are chemists." 



BRITISH ENTERPRISE IN BRAZIL 



UNDER the above heading 77^,? British Trade Journal 

 (London) prints a letter from a correspondent at Para, in 

 which the preeminence of British trade in northern Brazil is re- 

 ferred to in detail. It is stated that fully two-thirds of the 

 goods on sale in the stores of Paid and Manaos come from 

 Great Britain, and that " public confidence in British houses 

 and British methods of conducting business is undoubtedly 

 firmly established and wholly unassailable." The more impor- 

 tant undertakings in the way of public enterprise are in Eng- 

 lish hands, such as the city tramways and electric and gas light- 

 ing in Para, the Mandos Harbor, Limited, and the Amazon 

 Steam Navigation Co., Limited. The Manaos Harbor com- 

 pany, which handled 300,000 tons of goods last year, all of 

 which paid tribute to it, is described as being intimately con- 

 nected with the Booth Steamship Co., Limited, of Liverpool, 

 who possess a practical monopoly of the cargo and passenger 

 carrying trade between England and the Amazon. The corre- 

 spondent asserts that money is being made fast in Para and 

 Mandos, and is being invested freely in new buildings and other 

 improvements. He predicts a rapid expansion of business and 

 points to the promise of good returns on British capital. 



